The construction of the dictatorship, the silencing of opponents, and the regime’s torture sites.

Introduction
(Francesco Bertolucci, journalist)

How does fascism eliminate dissent and slowly take away the freedom of Italians? How does Mussolini build the dictatorship? What happens to the parties? What about the opponents? To try to answer these questions, we spoke with Gianluca Fulvetti, a professor at the University of Pisa and author of numerous books on the period of the 20-year period and World War II. Professor, how do Italians lose their freedoms, that is, how is dictatorship constructed by Mussolini? How is dissent repressed? And what is the role of violence in all this?

FULVETTI ANSWER: So fascism is clearly a political movement that has an identity link with violence. In short, it makes it a programmatic instrument of conquest of power then. It wasn’t just truncheons and castor oil as historiography has revealed however it is an identity element. It was an identity element of the very first Fascist political community, let’s call it that, which was the reality of the Fasci di combattimento that were born in Milan in March 1919, and then it was an identity element of these groups of squadrists who, from the end of 1920, in other words from the spring of 1921, began to hunt down political opponents. In short, that was also the regime’s consensus-building ground, because at the first elections in November 1919, the outcome had been, let’s say, a failure.
So it is a violence that is first used to go and re-conquer the countryside to the detriment of the peasant movement and then used to make an assault on the cities and therefore on those that are the places of participation, of the political literacy of the opponents: the headquarters of the parties, of the trade unions, the chambers of Labour, the houses of the People. Mussolini came to power with the march on Rome or rather after the march on Rome, then with the blessing of the king who gave him the task of forming a government. There is a transitional phase that goes from the autumn of 1922 until in fact 1925 in which the Fascists rule together with a piece of the liberal ruling class convinced that they can constitutionalise this movement together with a piece of the Popular Party which is a mass party of Catholics, born in 1919 that has a more social, more trade unionist soul that supported the peasant movement and instead has a more moderate one, conditioned by the filter of anti-communism. By the fear that what happened in Russia might also happen in Italy. The building of the dictatorship in fact came out of the Matteotti crisis, Matteotti’s assassination, the investigations, it is understood that the instigator was Mussolini in the summer autumn of the 24th. It was the only moment of crisis for Fascism and Mussolini came out of it with the speech of January the 25th in which he said ‘I could have used even more violence, I have curbed it’. In fact he claims and takes responsibility for what happened. And between the 25th and 26th of January, the construction of the dictatorship actually began, with the birth of the OVRA, an anti-fascist surveillance and repression organisation, of this secret police, with the birth of the special state court, which is this body responsible, let’s say, for judging and prosecuting political opponents, thus creating a political system of a single party, a single trade union, all other associations were dissolved, so formally the Albertine Statute was not abrogated, but that was the moment when the rule of law broke down. That is, citizens are no longer all equal before the law because there is a ban on the reconstitution of political parties, in Italy and abroad. The key passage is law 2008 of 1926 and some of the articles highlight this very aspect, in short, anti-fascists who go abroad to continue their fight lose their citizenship, the state can confiscate their property, so that is the moment when dictatorship begins. And then political opponents start ending up in prison once they are convicted using the penal code. Others end up in what are called places of confinement. It is another of the repressive instruments of the regime, a bit of an extension of the forced stay that liberal Italy had already created, it is an administrative measure, not a penal one, extremely arbitrary. In fact, if you read the definition given by Fascism itself, I think in ‘38, in “39, the Italian encyclopaedia published the entry ”confinement’, written by a magistrate, in other words, a lawman, it says that it is a measure of a preventive nature: the person who is dangerous, let’s say for the political life of the country, is removed from his environment, from his family network, from his friendship network, to make him, let’s say, harmless. And he is sent hundreds, in some cases many hundreds of kilometres away, he is watched by the authorities, so formally he is not in prison. In short, however, it is as if that too were a place of detention. Among other things, the sentence of confinement can be imposed for a maximum of five years, but it can be repeated. So it is at that stage there that anti-fascists begin to measure themselves against the experience of prison.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: But in all this, what happens to the parties?

FULVETTI ANSWER: It’s not that the parties disappear. So the Socialist Party, the Communist Party try to maintain a minimum clandestine structure operating in Italy. The one that held out the longest was the Communist Party of Italy as it was called at the time. In the early 1930s, there were more or less 3,000 militants who were active mainly in the country’s most important cities, in the working-class towns. The Italian Socialist Party was broken up almost immediately. There are groups linked to the anarchist movement, which is a very important political culture in Italian history and which is then effectively wiped out by fascism. In 1929 in Paris, Carlo Rosselli promoted the birth of Justice and Freedom, which is a new anti-fascist political movement that somewhat mixed the demands of republicans and socialists, let’s say non-Soviet. And there are some Justice and Freedom groups active in the country. It is a new movement that has both this intellectual nature, of scholars who are also beginning to study fascism – the first laboratory of studies on fascism, probably Justice and Freedom – but there is also conspiratorial activity in Italy. So if you are arrested for this conspiratorial type activity, for this political activity of proselytising, printing leaflets going into factories to talk to workers and so on, you end up in prison. On the basis, precisely, of the rules laid down in the fascist laws. Many of these anti-fascists, in short, leave Italy and go to relate to what are the foreign centres of these parties, then later return…. So there is an attempt to keep open the flame of pluralism, of denunciation, of proselytising, that is. But these activities, which should be normal in a liberal Democratic context because they belong to pluralism, are forbidden by the regime. And so if you are linked to these clandestine party structures, you are tried by the special court of state defence, in fact as a traitor, and on the basis of the convictions you spend longer or shorter periods in prison. And alongside these are these sentences that are combined by these provincial confinement commissions. So there is this double dimension of imprisonment, which the antifascists in Italy have to deal with from 25-26 onwards. Rosselli is arrested immediately, I think it’s the end of 1926, because he helped Turati, who is secretary of the united socialist party, to escape to France. So this is sufficient practice to have him sentenced to confinement. Among the first trials of the special State Defence Court, there is the one against the leaders of the Communist Party of Italy, the trial of Gramsci, and then it is a work that naturally goes on in the peripheral contexts. Some of these trials have a great deal of media coverage, because fascism wants to show its ability to strike at what it has called an antinomy. They are the traitors to the Fatherland, they are the traitors to the nation. Others of these proceedings perhaps play out more in the local contexts of precisely the small-medium cities

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: So what was prison for anti-fascists? Was it also a formative experience, so to speak?

FULVETTI ANSWER: On the experience of prison, anti-fascism then built, let’s say, a piece of its myth. The fact that those who went to prison had an extraordinary capacity to resist the regime. And that in the folds, let’s say, of this experience of imprisonment, both in prison and at the confinement, very hard, terrible interrogations, in some cases torture, one occasionally manages to study. At the confinement, Rosselli wrote Socialismo liberale, which is his most important text. In 1941, Spinelli and Colorni wrote the Ventotene Manifesto, which is one of the manifestos of Europeanism, so they managed to write these lines while in confinement. Here, I repeat, this myth has been built up a little, that being in prison was also an opportunity to train, to become politically literate, to study, to prepare oneself and to be ready once the conditions were created to be able to reorganise an opposition to fascism. Historiography in recent years has shown that myth is one thing, factual reality is another. For example, with respect to the question of the request for a pardon. The leaders of the anti-fascist parties strongly emphasise that fascism should not be asked for a pardon. If anything, a review of the trial but not a pardon because it means recognising the authority of the regime. So this is a step that one does not want to take. The maximum, emblematic example is that of Sandro Pertini, the future President of the Republic. There is the mother who sends a letter to Mussolini asking him to pardon her son and he replies, if I remember correctly it is the time when he is in Pianosa, saying never, ever will I make such a step because the dimension of political militancy, my political ideas, is more important than a step of that kind that would mean giving recognition to fascism. Instead, the reality of things tells us something else. Almost a thousand, if we look only at Communist Party militants, who actually ask for pardon because the experience of imprisonment is a traumatic experience that changes you from a molecular point of view, as Gramsci wrote in one of his notebooks. A man who enters prison after one year is a different man, after two he is a different man again, and after three he is a different man still. There is a nice little book by Aldo Agosti, a colleague from the University of Turin, a scholar of anti-fascism, published I think a couple of years ago, which tells the story of Cesare Casse, a Turin communist, a trade unionist, a militant revolutionary, one of those who tried to organise the Communist Party. When the repression arrives, when the fascist laws arrive, he is arrested in ‘27. He is married and has a little girl, born recently. He is interrogated, he goes through a whole series of prisons…. Turin, Spoleto, Perugia… he writes these letters to his wife and finally in 1934, he gives up. He gives up because he weighs what Agosti calls the trap of feelings, that is, with respect to the dimension of militancy he wants to go home to his wife to this and this child. He does not betray any of his other militant comrades, so it is not that he talks but he asks for mercy. It is granted to him, he goes out and on these dynamics then afterwards mechanisms of oblivion are also triggered in the post-war period. Because he returns to Turin anyway, some of the anti-fascist circles that are consigned to inaction from a political point of view, from a public point of view, it is not that all the anti-fascists have disappeared. They get to know him and he gets a bit branded. And even after 1945 when the first books on the history of the communist movement in Turin, the new order, the occupation of the factories, the trade union, came out, his name disappeared as a result. It is as if there is a bit of a damnatio memoriae dimension. And in prisons and places of confinement there also end up, for example, those anti-fascists who go to fight in Spain. This is another of the great myths of European anti-fascism and it is not just a myth, it is an extraordinary page. In short, militant anti-fascists from all over the world, of 40 nationalities, who go to defend the Republic, after Franco starts the civil war in the summer of 1936. They went from New Zealand, the United States, Canada, South America, about 4,000 Italians also went, some already linked to the clandestine structures of the anti-fascist parties. Some are already abroad on a spill. Many leave on their own from Italy. For example from Tuscany, there are about 400 of them and many of them leave on their own by boat, from the Tyrrhenian coast they go to Corsica and from there to southern France and then they are included in these mechanisms that favour the influx of volunteers to defend the Republic. It is a traumatic experience for two reasons. One because fighting is not an easy passage, so to take up a rifle, beyond political convictions, can be a repelling experience. This is true in Spain as it is in the Italian resistance after ‘43. And then there is the defeat of the Republic at the beginning of ’39. It is difficult, also because, let’s say, another element emerges that divides the European anti-fascist world a little, which is the question of Stalinism. So the relationship with the Soviets for antifascists of libertarian, socialist, anarchist culture is not easy. Inside the Spanish civil war, there is also a double civil war in 37-38. In the end when there is defeat, these antifascists who try to escape, some go back to France, some go to Mexico, in short the vast majority cross the Pyrenees and go to France. In short, it had not gone to defend the Republic but had been the landing place of European anti-fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. In France too, the political balance had changed on the eve of the Second World War, they were undesirables and were put in detention camps. So they experience the internment camps in France anyway. Then France is invaded by Germany, the Vichy Republic arrives and so from 1940 onwards agreements are made with the fascist government and many of these men return and go straight to prison. So when you get to 43 on 25 July 8 September, in short, the transition of that year, among the anti-fascists who came out of prison in August of 43, just between 25 July and 8 September, we find some anti-fascists who had always stayed in Italy but others who also went to fight in Spain and then afterwards were forced to come to terms with this experience again.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: Even when Italy declared war on England in 1940, many anti-fascists ended up in prison I imagine.

FULVETTI ANSWER: So let’s say that the question that probably when Italy entered the war in June ‘40, there was little or nothing left of organised anti-fascism in our country. There is certainly a dimension of what Giovanni De Luna has called existential anti-fascism, that is, they are political identities that are perhaps handed down from father to son, that remain within families. But they do not have a public outlet and above all they do not have a collective dimension because by then, as it were, the regime’s mechanisms had worked, so the picture of Italian and European antifascism in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War is a merciless one. That is, the regime’s repressive instruments worked. In order to survive, people made choices of conformism, of acceptance of the dictatorship’s context. Another of the regime’s instruments is the central political register. This way of filing all subversives, which by the way was created by liberal Italy in 1894, after there are the Fasci Siciliani, the protests in Lunigiana of the quarrymen and so on, which fascism systematises. So the subversives are followed up by the police authorities, reports are written which are sent to the Ministry of the Interior and when a person is no longer considered politically dangerous, he or she is removed from this file of subversives. Which, by the way, was not cancelled in ‘45 but after ’45 in the context of the Cold War and protected democracy, it continued to be used to card political opponents. But beyond that when one is no longer dangerous one is disbarred, there is the institution of disbarment. And the drafting reached its peak in the 1930s. Now, some anti-fascists are also good at camouflage and so they say in short I concentrate on private, everyday life, I wait for better conditions to arrive. But there is this effective dimension of renunciation on the part of anti-fascism.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: When is there a change, a turning point for Italian antifascism? When do oppositions manage to regain strength?

FULVETTI ANSWER: The picture only changes with the Second World War and the bad trend for Italy in the Second World War. The chronology is clear. The winter of 42-43 was the winter of the social economic crisis, in March ‘43 there were strikes in the workers’ towns which then continued in April and in that winter some anti-fascist circles were reconstituted, whether liberals, Catholics, veterans, let’s say from Giustizia e Libertà who created the Partito d’Azione and the Communist Party in that winter had some of its militants return to Italy, clandestinely. Because it realises that there are now conditions to proselytise in Italian society and to find a greater willingness to do anti-fascist type activities. Then the war was going badly and then a few months later came the Allied landings in Sicily, completely changing the context. For a long time, however, it was said that there was great continuity between anti-fascism and resistance. Here the most recent research actually shows that this continuity did not exist. It was created because from time to time we find a few old antifascists who join the Partisan formations and even more so we find old antifascists who have been in prison in confinement, who join the Cln, the National Liberation Committees and then are candidates in the municipal councils when elections are held in the spring of 1946. Because they are, let’s say, more mature people, who have a minimum of political experience behind them, they guarantee parties. We find them less in the Resistance because many of them are in their forties and the experience of the mountains is complicated, even from a physical point of view. From here it was said as if to say that anti-fascism would have had a great capacity to resist, that the clandestine structures would have been operational all through the 1930s, that the true feeling of the Italians would have been an anti-fascist feeling in those two decades that however could not be manifested because there were the repressive instruments of the dictatorship… That’s a somewhat simplistic reading, let’s say

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: When the regime fell then came 8 September, the prisons then began to fill up with what we could call new anti-fascists, that is, the 20-year-olds who had grown up under the regime who had never opposed it, but who ended up in prison and were often also deported.

FULVETTI ANSWER: Well, yes, because that’s the moment of choice, to quote the first chapter of a civil war, Claudio Pavone’s book that came out in 1991 and changed the way of writing and studying the history of the Resistance, so go and look less at the acronyms of political parties and programmes and think more about the concrete conditions in which these 20-year-olds, and not just 20-year-olds, joined the partisan formations. Therefore to reason why they did it if they came from families where a minimum of existential anti-fascism had remained, or because they had matured the conviction that it was necessary to do something by going to fight in the fascist wars abroad. That there is also an anti-fascism that we can call a war anti-fascism, they do it precisely as a reaction, let’s say, to the regime, for generational reasons, because they say we are 20 years old and now it is our turn and therefore we must be the protagonists of our own destiny, many do it for private matters, following friends, following loves. So how to say the literature of the Resistance, Neghello, Fenoglio, told us long before the historiography that later came to us with Pavone, how it is not that it is the political identities already formed after 8 September that drive young people. It’s not that one goes to the mountains because one is a communist, a socialist, a Catholic. One goes for other reasons. Then perhaps one becomes literate within the resistance. And of course you come to terms with German repression, with the repression of republican fascism, and you end up in prison. You end up in these places of detention, you often come to terms with torture, which is one of the great nightmares of these guys. There is a beautiful chapter in Santo Peli’s book dedicated to the phenomenon of Gappismo, which is a particular page in the history of the Italian Resistance, which tells precisely of torture, of the great fear that this experience could bring. The fear of not being up to the mark, of not holding up, therefore of speaking out and therefore of betraying, of denouncing some comrades precisely of the Resistance choice. And there are also those who, because they are afraid of this passage, for example, commit suicide as does Gianfranco Mattei who was a chemistry teacher at the Polytechnic who becomes the bomb-maker of the Roman Gap. The brother of Teresa Mattei who was later to be Constituent and whatnot. So one comes to terms with the experience of detention, which in some cases is also the first stage of deportation, i.e. after 8 September this element is also added. As a consequence of the partisan and anti-fascist choice, one can end up inside the German concentration system, which is a complicated concentration system, let’s say, that has above all three dimensions. There is the dimension of what are called Konzentrationslager, KL, the camps for political opponents: Dachau and its brothers in short. Because that is the camp that was created by Himmler, by Eike, in 1935. Then there are the extermination camps, the Vernichtungslager, around which there is a vast network of work camps, starting especially in 1942 after the Wannsse conference decided on the systematic extermination of the Jews. Labour camps in which prisoners of war of various nationalities end up in the countries where the Wehrmacht went to fight and create occupation governments: from the Balkans to France, Holland, Belgium, of course the Soviet Union and to some extent Italy. This is what happened to Italian soldiers after 8 September: allied with Germany until the day before, after the armistice they became traitors. Those who try to resist are disarmed and passed over for arms. This is the context in which, for example, the massacre of Cephalonia took place, the most serious massacre of Italian citizens carried out by the Germans. Many were disarmed and deported to Germany. And a million Italian soldiers end up in this network of labour camps, in any case within the concentration camp system. They can choose to swear allegiance to the Reich and the Italian Social Republic and return to Italy. They can choose to opt out. Out of this million soldiers, more or less let’s say a little over a hundred thousand will actually do so. So 800,000 soldiers refuse this oath and remain in the camps, thus coming to terms with an experience that is in any case an absolutely difficult one.
And then the deportation of anti-fascists begins, after the strikes. Because this is also one of the forms of the practices that antifascism uses to manifest opposition to the occupying Germans and the Italian Social Republic. Strikes since the autumn of ‘43 between Genoa, Turin, Milan at regular intervals. They reach their apex in the first week of March ‘44, with the general strike in upper Italy, and the response is a harsh one. Because in the factories where there had been strikes, the Germans often arrived with lists of workers who had gone on strike, which meant that there was the dimension of denunciation by other Italians often supported by the republican fascists, and they were deported to concentration camps. The estimate of political deportation speaks of 24-25 thousand people, although it is not always easy to arrive at an estimate because then there are not systematised entry directors in all the camps. It all becomes much more chaotic the more you enter 44 even for Germany itself. So we have this idea of a country that has great bureaucratic familiarity in managing the mechanisms of repression, the mechanisms of extermination. It is clear that then the more you enter ‘44, the more complicated this becomes.
And the last link I mentioned of course is that of racial deportation. Because the history of the Shoah as far as our country is concerned lies in the autumn of 1943. Perhaps the most significant event is the rounding up of the Rome ghetto on 15 October 1943 and then there is the passage of the Verona Congress, which is the only congress of the CSR in which republican fascism confirms the choice of racial laws and Guido Buffarini Guidi, the CSR Minister of the Interior, on 30 November issues a circular to all the police headquarters and prefectures in which he says ‘let us go in search of the Jews and make them available to the Germans to be deported’. So here too there is a clear responsibility on the part of republican fascism. So it is the whole context that then leads to the construction of a mechanism of deportation, with trains leaving Rome from Florence from platform 21 to Milan where now there is also a structure, a beautiful museum structure, and across the Brenner Pass they then end up in the extermination camps. The vast majority then of the Jews taken from Italy end up in Auschwitz

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: Let’s say to get there they recycle, in quotes, even those that are prisoner of war camps, such as Fossoli, which is used as a camp.

FULVETTI ANSWER: Yes, the story of Fossoli is an emblem of what happens in Italy between ‘43 and ’45, also taking into account another aspect: one of the objectives of the German soldiers fighting in Italy at a certain point is also to capture the labour force, that is to capture adult men. In part they are employed for fortification work in Italy under what is precisely the Todt organisation, the organisation of this officer, Fritz Todt, work on the Gothic and whatnot. Many, however, became Arms for the Reich, to quote a piece of the title of a book edited by Brunello Mantelli, who is a colleague who in recent years has promoted specific research on this, on deportation to work, to forced labour, very very important. Because there is really a systematic pattern of arresting the population that often goes hand in hand with massacres against the civilian population. So when you do the big round-ups in partisan areas, you use violence by going and killing people, those who are most compromised with the partisan movement but then you arrest tens, hundreds of people and there is really a network of temporary camps from central Italy, from Apennine Italy. And then afterwards you end up in Fossoli, Verona…. For some the stop is at the Bolzano Gries camp and then afterwards you end up in Austria, in Germany. And Fossoli is the emblem of all this. Because Fossoli was first there for Allied prisoners of war, then it became a detention camp for Jews, from which trains left for Auschwitz. At a certain point in 1944 the anti-fascists also ended up there, while in the late summer of 1944 it became a transit camp for forced labourers. For those who were then deported to Germany for this purpose. Most of the German men are fighting and therefore the fact that this mass of slaves can be used inside the factories, inside these labour camps, is in any case one of the keys that also explains the hold of Nazism until the end of ‘44, the beginning of ’45. So a hold that continues for a very very long time. One last consideration, if we look at prisons or, more generally, places of detention, there are not only the buildings. There are the buildings that are also partly used today with a memorial value, they are the places where torture took place, often and gladly run by Italian personnel not just German personnel, Via Tasso and so on. The prisons, the places of detention in the Italy of 43-44, above all, are many. This is an aspect that must not be forgotten. Because often German divisions, especially some that crossed Italy from south to north in the retreat, especially in the summer of ‘44, also had divisional prisons. So if there is a command that is stationed for two months in an area of central Italy, it chooses a building, confiscates it and uses it as a divisional prison. And these too are places, of torture, of interrogation, of harassment of Italians who are arrested. It occurs to me that the most violent German unit that fought in Italy, which is General Max Simon’s 16th SS Division, is the unit that carried out the massacre of Sant’Anna di Stazzema, of Vinca, of Bardine, of Monte Sole, better known as the massacre of Marzabotto, but it is correct to say Monte Sole because that is the whole area, not just the municipality of Marzabotto that lies in that area. For example, when he managed the depressive actions in the whole area north of the Arno river, i.e. between the Arno and the Apuan Alps and the Apennines, he set his headquarters in Nozzano, which is a town on the border between Pisa and Lucca, and there is his divisional prison, which is the prison through which many people who are captured during the round-ups pass, those most suspected of links with partisan activities, and many of these are then later put to the sword. So if we think in this way of places of detention there is also this dimension in the context of the occupation that comes out.